You may recognize the universal feed icon from your favorite Web sites, blogs and podcasts. A web feed is a data format used for serving users frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation.

A "Feed Reader" is required for using Web Feeds. This tool works like an automated e-mail program, but no e-mail address is needed. The user subscribes to a particular web feed, and thereafter receives updated contents, every time updating takes place. Feed Readers may be online (like a webmail account) or offline. An offline web feed requires to be downloaded to the user's system. Feed readers are used in personalized home page services to put content such as news, weather and stock quotes appear on the user's personal page. Content from other sites can also be added to that personalized page, again using feeds. Organizations can use a web feed server behind their firewall to distribute, manage and track the use of internal and external web feeds by users and groups. Other web-based tools are primarily dedicated to feed-reading only. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.0 allow receipts of feeds from the tool bar, as well as Safari on the Mac, using the Live Bookmarks and Favorites sections respectively. Finally, there are desktop-based feed readers, e.g. Newsgator and Feed Demon. These are like email programs for web feeds. Attensa for Outlook is a feed reader that puts the feeds in Microsoft Outlook.

Benefits

Web feeds also have some advantages compared to receiving frequently published content via email:
•  When subscribing to a feed, users do not disclose their email address, so users are not increasing their exposure to threats associated with email: spam, viruses, phishing, and identity theft.
• If users want to stop receiving news, they do not have to send an 'unsubscribe' request; users can simply remove the feed from their aggregator.
• The feed items are automatically "sorted" in the sense that each feed URL has its own sets of entries (unlike an email box, where all mails are in one big pile and email programs have to resort to complicated rules/pattern matching).

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